truth now. So clearly this estate agent didn’t speak directly to you. Why did this man lie for you? Because you or your brother are good customers of his? And who answered the phone?’
‘I’m telling the truth, and so is the estate agent. I did not have my phone with me,’ said Markus. He was starting to sober up and kept licking his dry lips. ‘My son drove my car east to the summerhouse and he had my phone with him. I was hoping that someone would remember having seen my car during the trip, to make my alibi more credible. Actually, no witness to the road trip could be found, but that didn’t really make any difference. In any case, I had borrowed my son’s car.’
‘I still don’t understand this business with the phone call,’ said Gudni. ‘Does your son’s voice sound like yours?’
‘No, not at all,’ replied Markus.‘I’d prepared everything really well. I bought two mobile phones and put untraceable pay-as-you-go Sim cards in them, which I bought at a petrol station. Then I gave Hjalti two phones, mine and one of the ones I’d bought, while I kept the other one myself. That evening I called my mobile phone from Alda’s home phone, pretending to have left it at work so that she wouldn’t suspect anything. Hjalti answered and we exchanged a few words. Then we said goodbye and I got down to business.’ Markus paused for a moment and Thora wondered whether his conscience was troubling him or if he was simply resting his voice.
He continued: ‘I’d made a rather low bid on an apartment that I’d chosen randomly, with an estate agent I know a little. I had to be sure that he could tell whether it was me on the phone or someone else. It wouldn’t have done me any good to use someone who couldn’t confirm it was me he’d spoken to. I let the bid stand until eight o’clock and had the estate agent promise to call me on my mobile immediately afterwards to let me know the result. Just before eight Hjalti used the pay-as-you-go phone I’d given him to call the one that I had, and we kept the connection open until the estate agent finally called. Then Hjalti answered my mobile there near Hella, and put the phones together so that the speaker of one touched the microphone of the other. That’s how I could talk to the estate agent without my real whereabouts being traceable at all. There were some glitches in the connection but I told him that it was because I was on the road near Hella. He accepted that. I’d already tested it out so I knew it would work.’
Thora gaped at Markus. Naturally she wanted to ask him about everything, but Gudni would have to take care of that for the moment. Markus’s position was equally dire, whether Thora attended his interrogation or not. Her job was to support Markus, though it was unclear what advice she could give him at that moment. The only thing she could think of was to try to prove that Markus was unfit to stand trial, although he appeared determined to tell the entire story to save Hjalti.
‘Did your son have any knowledge of what was going on?’ asked Gudni.
‘No, all he knew was that if he did me this favour, I would buy him an apartment out on the Islands. It’s been a dream of his for a long time. I’m afraid he won’t get the chance to enjoy his new place as he should have. He’s been a complete wreck, the poor kid, since he realized what I was up to.’
‘But why did you do this, Markus? We thought you were in love with Alda. You seemed to be the last person who would wish her any harm.’ Gudni’s question was sincere.
‘I told you,’ Markus replied, indignant. ‘I tried to avoid it, and I gave her lots of opportunities to sort this out by some other means. It simply didn’t work out that way.’
‘Sort what out?’ asked Gudni.
‘Oh, this thing with the head,’said Markus, as if that explained everything. He looked from Gudni to Thora and back, but neither of them knew what he was trying to say. He sighed and explained himself better: ‘I cut off the man’s head. Not Alda. I did it for her, but as usual I got no thanks for it.’
‘You cut off the head,’ repeated Gudni calmly. ‘Weren’t you in a drunken stupor at home when the murders were committed?’
‘No, I wasn’t that bad,’replied Markus. ‘I was drunk, but not as drunk as the others. I crashed on the couch, but the phone woke me up in the middle of the night. It was Geiri, Alda’s father, calling to ask Dad to come over. He wanted to discuss Dadi’s offer to help them cover everything up. My mum also woke up and came out of the bedroom. When she saw the blood on Dad, who’d been sitting like a statue in the kitchen since he got back from the harbour, she asked him what was going on. In the end he told her the whole story. They didn’t know I was there, but I heard everything. I knew Dad and Geiri had killed the men, and I knew what one of them had done to Alda. I also heard Dad say where the bodies were, in a fishing smack tied to the last pontoon in the harbour. I sneaked out and went down there, after Dad had gone to Geiri’s place and Mum had run off crying to the bedroom. I found the boat with the bodies on board, cut off the head and genitals of the one I thought most likely to have raped Alda, and took them with me to show her. I thought it would help her get over it.’
Thora leaned in towards Markus, although it repulsed her to be close to him, and whispered in his ear:‘You might want to be careful about mentioning your family members by name. Especially those who are still with us. Of course it’s up to you what you say, but you might regret it in the morning.’
‘And is that when you put the head into the box? To take it home?’ asked Gudni.
‘No, the box came later,’ replied Markus. ‘I put it in a bag and just managed to hide behind a pile of nets when Dad and Dadi came back down to the harbour. They discussed something until some old guy turned up, but they got rid of him quite quickly. Dad went aboard, brought out a birdcage and released the bird. He left shortly after that, but I waited to see what Dadi was up to. He went down into the boat and came up afterwards, looking very pale. He’d obviously been startled to see that a head – and more – was missing from one of the bodies. He went and got his pick-up, and hauled the other three bodies into it. He spread a cloth over them and parked the pick-up a short distance away. Then he pulled a little rubber dinghy on board the smack and sailed off in the smack with the fourth body still on board. He sunk the ship and came back to shore on the dinghy. I hurried home and hid the head in a box down in the basement, and I also put the tools I used to cut it off in one of the boxes in the storeroom, under all the other stuff.’
‘Why did you use the salmon priest?’ Thora blurted out. She could understand his needing a knife, but not a mallet.
‘I took both of them because I thought it might be difficult to cut through the spine.’ Markus stared at the wall behind Gudni.
‘Did you know Dadi had taken the bodies down into the basement?’ asked the inspector, trying to hide his amazement.
‘No, they weren’t there the evening before the eruption. I’m absolutely certain of that. I overheard a conversation between Geiri and Dad on board their ship, Strokkur, when I was helping them after school. They didn’t know I could hear them. According to Geiri, Dadi had contacted him to say he still had the bodies as leverage if Dad and Geiri didn’t keep to their side of the bargain. From what I could understand, Dadi had panicked when he saw the head was missing, and accused Geiri of having removed it in order to pin the murder on him. In other words, Dadi thought that Dad and Geiri were going to bring the head to his house to make it look as if he’d murdered the men. Geiri had no idea what he was talking about, since he didn’t know anything about the disappearance of the head, and neither did Dad. They thought Dadi was making it up. They didn’t know where he was keeping the bodies,and neither did I, but I do know they weren’t in our basement yet.’
It took Thora a while to digest this. Dadi suspected that the two partners, Magnus and Geiri, were going to betray him, and wanted to secure his position by hanging on to the bodies. She exhaled. Clearly this Dadi hadn’t been the brightest person in the Islands. How could he think that being in possession of the mens’bodies would prove he hadn’t murdered them? Maybe he’d planned to put them in Magnus and Geiri’s ship, since he thought they were going to hide the head at his house. She nearly laughed out loud. This was so ridiculous. These people must have been desperate. It seemed most likely to her that Dadi would have hidden the bodies somewhere in the vicinity of his house, but not actually inside. When the eruption had started he may have thought it best to move them to Magnus’s basement, where they would be buried forever. In the unlikely event that they were found, suspicion would then fall on Magnus, not Dadi.
Maybe he had stored the bodies somewhere they risked being found; the rescuers had wandered freely in and out of all the houses, and someone could easily have stumbled across them. In all likelihood, he had waited until he was certain
